From the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
We had difficulty convincing our son that Colorado was dry land. Two years old, otherwise unfazed by our landing at Denver International Airport, he had for some reason decided that the landscape beyond the runway was an ocean. ‘No go in the water,’ he pleaded with us as we made our way through the corridors towards immigration control – ‘No go in the water.’ We promised that he didn’t need to worry about the ocean here, but it didn’t do much good. He kept fretting until we were safely in the mountains. The landscape he was seeing was the one in his head.
The landscape in our head is at the heart of Maurice Sendak’s most famous book, Where the Wild Things Are (1963). Sent to his room without any supper for being a wild thing himself, Max, dressed in his favourite wolf suit, turns confinement into its opposite: the room becomes the world all around, where an ocean tumbles by with a private boat that takes him on a year-long voyage to where the Wild Things live. The point, and the beauty, of the book, though, is that a purely psychological interpretation falls short. The landscape in Max’s head is no less real than the walls of his room; the Wild Things are no less real than his own drawing of one, pinned to the wall on the second page of the book. And the year sailing out is no less real than the time it takes for his parents to bring up supper to Max’s room, where, returning from his travels, he finds it on his bedside table, still hot.
The thing that is usually said about Sendak is that he was more than usually able to tap in to the dream logic of children – their seemingly innocent capacity to see the world as they want it to be. As ‘Wild Things’, the superb retrospective of his work currently at Denver Art Museum after stints at the Columbus Museum of Art and the Skirball Cultural Center, shows, that is both true and not true. It is certainly true of In the Night Kitchen (1970), where Mickey falls out of his bed and into a culinary cityscape where three Oliver Hardy lookalikes labour through the dark to bake a cake for everyone’s breakfast. When the dream ends, the reader returns not quite to reality but to a world where, ‘thanks to Mickey, we have cake every morning’. Why not let the dream dictate the real for once?
In the Night Kitchen (1970), Maurice Sendak. © The Maurice Sendak Foundation
Dream thinking is not, though, the same thing as wishful thinking. Sendak was, above all, a believer in the complexity of the child’s world. In a comic strip of 1993 with Art Spiegelman – the artist behind the graphic novel Maus – he denied any overtones of Peter Pan-ish quaintness. Wandering through panels inspired by their books, avatars of Sendak and Spiegelman debate the oft-received compliment of being ‘in touch’ with your ‘childhood self’. Sendak doesn’t mince his words: ‘Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth! I say, “You are in touch, lady – you’re mean to your kids, you treat your husband like shit, you lie, you’re selfish… That is your childhood self!”’ Sendak – who was, like Spiegelman, the child of a Jewish family destroyed by the Shoah – thought of adults as the ones whose innocence needed protecting. ‘I knew terrible things,’ he says in the final panel, ‘but I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew… It would scare them.’ Adults, according to Sendak, are the ones with a real vested interest in seeing things as other than they are.
Perhaps the lesson is that children see both the dream and the reality. Pace Wittgenstein, they get to see the duck and the rabbit simultaneously, while adults are doomed to see only one or the other. As I walk through the show, a teacher is busy hushing a group of kids and asking them to be ‘respectful’. No wild rumpus here. She was seeing art; they were seeing what Sendak drew. Sendak was interested in those who, like him, preserved the double vision. One of the threads that emerges most clearly from Jonathan Weinberg’s curation is Sendak’s special affinity with forebears who specialised in what I might call perspicacious fantasies. Alongside his childhood consumption of the work of cartoonists such as Walt Disney and Winsor McCay, Sendak, an autodidact, learned his figurative approach from Dürer, Goya, Blake and Chagall – all clear-sighted and fantastical, all in their different ways transformers of the damaged real into the equally damaged unreal.
Outside Over There (1981), Maurice Sendak. © The Maurice Sendak Foundation
If these influences hang over Sendak’s figuration, though, it is landscape that I think of as I go round the galleries. In the United States I sometimes find it hard to think of anything else. Outside Denver International, the era of the untamed West is memorialised by a colossal statue of a rearing mustang. Inexplicably, it is blue, and equipped with glowing red eyes. Nicknamed Blucifer by locals, it killed its own creator, Luis Jiménez, when a chunk of the statue fell on him in 2006. It gazes out on the remnants of the Great Plains, varicosed by six-lane freeways and outbreaks of Denver suburb, with what appears to be demonic satisfaction at a job well done.
Among the sterile blocks of Denver itself, ‘Wild Things’ is a strange oasis. Sendak grew up in an urban environment, New York, but hung his home and studio with bucolic fantasias by Samuel Palmer and Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, eulogists of English and German landscapes already under threat in the 19th century. Their visual influence runs most clearly through books such as Outside Over There (1981) and Dear Mili (1988), but the nostalgia they embodied is omnipresent. Sendak harboured no illusions about retreating into an arcadian fantasy, but the dream of other Edens is everywhere in his work. It is not a simple dream, because like the children Sendak drew and wrote for, it knows all about death, loss and the disorder of the world. What it is, though, is a dream that understands the importance of being able to see the landscape in the head at the same time as the landscape of the real.
‘Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak’ is at Denver Art Museum until 17 February 2025.
From the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.